The antidote to ideologies

Next week in the eurozone

Philip Roesler, German economy minister reiterates that if Greece doesn’t deliver on its austerity budget, it won’t receive any more bail-out cash. An Italian think-tank says that if Greece leaves, other Clubmeds will give up.

Spanish bank depositors rush out to withdraw yet more cash on the news. The net worth of Spanish mattresses is estimated by Bloomberg to be €200bn. Valencia’s need for cash leaps from €3.5bn to €4.5bn.

Mario Monti meets with Merkel in Berlin and recommends several mouth-sewing techniques that could be administered to Roesler’s gob.

Merkel says Mario should wait and see what effect the bail-out of Spain’s battered lenders will have on markets before requesting aid. Monti says the ESM should become a bank or else everything will go tits up. Angela flies to Beijing to sign two more massive trade deals, during which German and Chinese are the only nationalities present.

Antonis Samaras tells the Greeks their country would effectively exit the euro and crumble without the next round of spending cuts leave the euro. This would, he adds without evidence, destroy Greece, and cause tectonic plates beneath the Aegean to shift.

Philip Roessler, who has been on a plane and thus unable to say anything for nine hours, rushes onto the Beijing tarmac and shouts “Greeks don’t keep their promises and so their firstborn must be slain”. Mass withdrawals take place in Spain and Italy.

A Bundestag CDU source says the obvious result of Grexit will be even more depositor withdrawals in Spain and Italy and so there will be no Grexit, it is all fixed and don’t worry. Spanish bank depositors rush to put all their money back in the banks. The mafia goes to every house in Italy demanding a bed. They collide with depositors rushing to put money back in the banks. An appalling death toll results.

Benjamin Netanyahu makes a public appeal to Evangelos Venizelos, guaranteeing him a lifetime supply of pies as part of the tripartite energy deal with Cyprus. Mossad secretly stands by, ready to poison the pies.

Spanish PM Rajoy appeals for calm. Catalonia tells Valencia, “I’ll meet your €4.5bn and raise you a further €8bn”. Warren Buffet takes a 40% stake in Valencia, vowing “This is the time to get in on the ground floor”. The Italian Mafia ships 2,700 beds to Valencia and deposits all of them in the regional bank. Madrid issues shares in Catalonia (2012) SA and hires Goldman Sachs to handle a New York IPO.

The Glazer Family flies its Delaware Headquarters to Spain, buys Murcia with unsold Manchester United non-voting shares, declares the club bankrupt, and demands an EU bailout.

Mario Draghi says he is exactly halfway between Mario Monti’s desire for an ESM bank and an enormous shovel right now expressed in Rome, and Angela Merkel’s position as evinced in Beijing that fiscal union must come first. Analysts calculate that this means Draghi is in Uzbekhistaan. A rumour sweeps the Paris Bourse that the ECB Chairman has defected and taken all the money with him.

Credit Agricole depositors block all the autoroutes leading out of France. A rumour sweeps Wall Street that nobody knows why the French farmers have done this, but Christine Lagarde Wanted posters are sprouting everywhere. A rumour tries to sweep the French autoroutes, but is stuck in traffic jams.

French PM Francois Hollande appeals for calm, and the air fare back from Madrid. David Cameron says everyone needs to pull their fingers out, roll up their sleeves, and pull up their socks as the Pound rockets to a 500 euro exchange rate, and 99.8% of Britain’s export orders are cancelled.

Louise Mensch hears of the new exchange rate, withdraws her entire life savings from Coutts in cash, and flies to Athens. She pays off the Greek national debt anonymously, but then accidentally backs into her press conference afterwards and is proclaimed Empress of Antipaxos.

Meanwhile. back here in Blighty, Cameron says, “EU important …. survival essential to UK’s interest … a further £50bn has been earmarked for support of the euro … sure the whole country is behind us on this one … ” Clegg winces and bites lip as Redwood leans forward and jabs him in the buttocks with a biro – this is mistaken as disagreement with the Cabinet policy and Tory calls for his resignation are renewed. Boris Johnson, when asked to comment, said, “Cripes! I say ..! Oiks, every one of them. Showaddywaddy ding dong. Have you seen the legs on that filly? Tally-ho – I’m orf chaps”.

I just read that through and was about to delete it as it seemed a bit puerile; then I realised that the great problems facing the peoples of Europe are being met with precisely this level of intellectual depth. So I left it in.

Thank you. I well remember hearing the delightful Mr Muir, who when once given Pythagoras’ famous theorem wove a tale involving red indians; the punch line of which was: “the sons of the sqaw with the hippopotamus were equal to the sons of the sqaws with the other two hides….”

@ william Good question….lets throw in a few Spanish regions while we are at it…..IF they manage to stagger as far as 13th Sept……..the $64,000 question seems to be what happens to Spainish banks and Sovreigns if Karlsruhe says even the slightest …YES BUT….something like “OK but no more”…to ESM version 1…or its a German Referendum on Eurobonds etc etc

@Caratacus & @JW
Wistful, witty and full of insight both of you. Thank you.

I had cause to attend a wedding today and during the boring parts I picked up a copy of the New Testament and re-read that bit about the 2000 year old (now) Jewish chap turning over the “money changers”‘ tables in the “temple”…I fear that nothing is any different two millennia later, but who out of us is able to turn the latter-day “money-changers” tables over today or tomorrow?

@gonads
Err, not being funny, but China’s real fears should be about the circa 2 billion of that Country’s population who do not even have running water or electricity…I have said something similar about the voting populace of Deutschland (long to rain (sic) over us) for years now, but the prospect of that many folk charging out of the paddy-fields towards the coast on the look-out for a half-decent lifestyle truly shares the crap out of me.

We in the West have had it too good for too long and we will crash and burn. Democracy, don’t you just love it?

There was also the long drawn out tale of a fish restaurant, the concluding line being, “Hans that does the dishes can be as soft as Gervase with the mild green hairy-lipped squid”. In the car at the time and nearly drove off the road … :-)

I agree here , no vampires , no bisexuals , no deep serious sex , no kidnappings , no hover craft chases …The main time Antonis Samaras in Greece is doing better in fiction telling the greeks that in two years the country will be a different country and all will be over .We will atribute this to his maternal great grand mother Penelope Delta who was practically greece’s first writer of children books ( one of her most famous books was “Antonis the fool” ).

I like how Merkel go to sign agreements to china that force them to import more cars from Germany in exchange for Chinese imports of textiles, and other products that are made in Southern Europe… and she does that on behalf of the whole europe

Exactly and not just here in the UK,many bloggers across America report lines at the most expensive coffee houses restraurants this Labor Day holiday-so much for all those millions of Americans unemployed and under fed.So what is going on?